This morning Gary Wisenbaker was arrested by the GSP for DUI. He apparently got drunk in Atlanta (Savannah Night at the Georgia Capitol) and made it almost all the way back to Savannah before he was pulled over and arrested. His picture was up on the jail site for only a few hours, then it was removed by the powers that be.

The exact same thing happened last month when Doug Andrews was arrested for carrying a weapon through the airport security gate. His mug shot was also removed three days before it was supposed to be.

I've occasionally thought that if I had three or four microphones on my roof I could get a better idea of where all the local gunshots come from. Tie a couple three sensors to an old oscilloscope, do a little math and there you go.

Well, who'd a thunk it, but that technology already exists. It's called Shotspotter and is already in use in thirty two US cities. It can, they claim, pinpoint the origin of a gunshot to within ten feet and upload that information to the police officer on the beat in real time. If true, that's pretty darned impressive.

...So the police decided to take a high tech approach to the problem. In October, the department spent $350,000 to install 84 ShotSpotter sensors on rooftops, utility poles, and other inconspicuous places over 6 square miles of urban blight. Since then, dispatchers have received roughly a dozen automatic alerts every day, each one an opportunity to get officers to the scene of a shooting while the gun is still smoking.

Charleston, South Carolina uses ShotSpotter. According to WCBD TV.com...

...Within seconds, the shot spotter can identify the location of the gunshot. Deputy Director of the National Enforcement of Corrections and Technology Center Peter Cosgrove explained the shot spotter program for News 2. Cosgrove said, "If a gunshot is detected, there will be an audible alarm and a red dot will show up on the map." North Charleston has 16 sensors throughout the city. News 2 can't show them due to security, but they pinpoint the area of one or several shots. Cosgrove said, "If it were a drive by shooting, the multiple gunshots would be detected and we could plot literally, the direction of travel." The shot spotter can also tell the difference between fireworks and gunshots.

"The city of Rochester has seen a 43 percent reduction in gunfire since the system went live in July of 2006. Within 48 hours of turning the system on we had our first felony arrest,"
- Mike Bialaszewski, Research and Evaluation Division, N.Y. Police Department.

"Alerted by the ShotSpotter System, police arrived just three minutes after the shots were fired."
- North Charleston Police Department

"The ShotSpotter Gunshot Location System does exactly what it promises to do."
- Det. Sgt. Ross Staggs, Franklin County, OH Sheriff's Department